Women and Black professionals are more willing to join a team that’s predominantly male or white if it helps them stand out in hyper-competitive situations, despite the potential psychological toll of being a “token,” new research says.
In fact, when a job offer from a competitive organization was on the line, women were twice as likely to choose to be part of an all-male team, according to a study co-authored by Edward H. Chang, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Faced with the same opportunity, Black professionals were 60 percent more likely to choose an all-white group.
Decades of diversity initiatives have failed to drastically alter the American executive suite, especially for Black people, who hold only 3.2 percent of senior executive roles. While the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have prompted deep reflection at many companies, navigating the corporate ladder remains a strategic exercise for underrepresented groups.
“There's a lot of pressure for many organizations to have certain amounts of diversity,” Chang says. “If you’re part of an underrepresented demographic group, you may believe that there are strategic benefits in competitive organizations to being one of the only ones in your team or organization with your identity.”
That said, choosing to be a team’s token—a member who’s held up superficially as a symbol of diversity—can be isolating and hurt performance, studies have shown. Members of a particular gender or racial minority might feel pressure to fill stereotypical roles or represent their entire group.
“It was unexpected to us that people would even be willing to put themselves in these situations,” says Chang, noting the vast research showing that people prefer groups that reflect their own beliefs, attitudes, and demographic traits.
The study, Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status, will appear in the November issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Standing out to succeed
Chang started the research in 2018 as a doctoral student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He teamed with Wharton Professor Katherine L. Milkman (DBA 2009) and Wharton doctoral candidate Erika L. Kirgios, who led the research. They conducted six experiments that probed how competition influenced the decisions of women and Black professionals.
In the first experiment, an online simulation, Kirgios, Chang, and Milkman asked 491 women to imagine that they were interns who needed to choose a department to join at a theoretical company. Participants browsed the photographs, names, and college majors of other interns in each department to help them decide, but researchers varied the number of women.
The team told some participants that one-quarter of interns would be offered full-time jobs, while others heard that everyone would be hired. When women knew they would need to compete for a job, 46 percent selected an all-male department. If every intern would receive an offer, 18 percent chose to work only with men.
The researchers invited 278 Black participants to consider the same scenario but varied the department’s racial composition instead of gender. They found that 37 percent of Black respondents picked an all-white group if they had to compete for a job, compared to 20 percent if they didn’t.
The team confirmed its initial findings through a laboratory experiment that applied a similar approach—a contest with varying numbers of prizes—to 202 women and men. When there were fewer awards to win, 23 percent of women chose all-male teams versus 9.7 percent in a less competitive situation.
Chang and his collaborators also probed the reasons behind these decisions. They surmised that women and people of color sought to avoid competing against those of similar backgrounds. Perhaps they were also responding to perceived “implicit quotas,” an organization’s informal goal to promote people from certain groups. However, neither of those reasons proved as powerful as the simple notion that their unique experience helped their ideas stand out.
Three steps toward addressing institutional racism
Companies have long used competition to motivate employees to think creatively and push themselves. Law firms, consultancies, and other adherents to the “up or out” philosophy aim to promote only the top-performing employees and encourage others to leave.
“These competitive pressures are potentially making people who are already represented in very small numbers put themselves in situations where they may not succeed in the future,” says Chang, noting that further research is needed to know whether choosing to be a token actually advances one’s career.
In a perfect world, women and people of color wouldn’t need to weigh such trade-offs, Chang says. Companies would find ways to reduce the strain on people who stand alone in a group and mitigate bias in promotion decisions.
“We need to recognize that choosing to be a token is a really hard choice,” Chang says. “People do seem to think there are strategic benefits to doing this, but there's also plenty of research showing the negative effects.”
Chang, who joined HBS in July, has spent the past five years studying how companies diversify their workforces. He offers the following advice for organizations trying to reduce institutional racism inside their walls:
Stop trying only to change minds. Research suggests that it’s difficult for people to shake long-held and ingrained stereotypes about race and gender. Chang says that “diversity training”—while often well-intentioned—is rarely effective on its own.
Focus on situations and processes. Rather than train people to be less racist, companies should look for ways to remove bias from decision-making, he says. A recent study by Chang found that managers hire people with more varied backgrounds when they’re bringing in multiple candidates at the same time, rather than hiring a single person in isolation.
Think big and commit resources. When it comes to diversity, companies sometimes do just enough to avoid media scrutiny or reputational damage. It’s time for bolder, systemic steps, such as tying diversity and inclusion goals to all managers’ performance evaluations, he says.
Chang, who has been part of anti-racism discussions at HBS, says that companies that are serious about inclusion must go beyond checking boxes. Meaningful change will require more than a chief diversity officer and rote training.
“Make commitments and take big action,” Chang says. “Don't treat diversity management as something you’re doing only for impression management.”
About the author
Danielle Kost is the senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
[Image: Harry Wedzinga]
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